


If You Find Me

by OverlyCheerfulRat



Category: Monster High
Genre: Abusive Parents, Childhood Sexual Abuse, Drug Abuse, Gen, Kidnapping, Prostitution, based on a book, named after a book, nothing is explicit but the plot itself is just very dark, this is fucked up not gonna lie
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-14
Updated: 2018-08-14
Packaged: 2019-06-27 04:01:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15677625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OverlyCheerfulRat/pseuds/OverlyCheerfulRat
Summary: Jackson and Holt Eddowes were raised by an abusive, meth-addicted father in a cabin three hours from the nearest town. Loosely based on "If You Find Me" by Emily Murdoch, but deviates from that plot in several ways.





	1. Luke's Decision

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [If You Find Me](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/406317) by Emily Murdoch. 



Luke Eddowes was a single father. He told himself he’d done a good job, and it didn’t matter how he’d gained custody of his sons. So what if he had technically kidnapped them? They didn’t remember that, they had been infants. And they had been happier with him than they would have been with their mother. He nodded to himself as he looked back on a tiny cabin in the middle of a national park. It wasn’t his, he had just found it years ago when he got lost on a hiking trip. It had been abandoned, so he patched it up, and the previous owners hadn’t been back. It was only one room, with a bed pressed against the wall in one corner, a small folding table in another, and another squared off with a curtain. That was the twin’s makeshift bedroom. It consisted of a cot and several pictures nailed to the walls. 

Luke was walking away from the place he had called home for the past fourteen years. He had to admit that it was harder to take care of his sons than it used to be. Not that they really needed to be taken care of, they were managing fine on their own, but it was hard for Luke to get to and from town these days. He had mentioned this to Holt a few nights ago, and he pointedly ignored the response- “maybe stop smoking meth, then.” He had been ignoring his sons ever since the incident, but Holt was harder to ignore than Jackson. Mainly because Jackson had apparently decided to stop talking.

With these things in mind, Luke had decided it was time to call his ex-wife. They hadn’t spoken in years, the cabin didn’t have electricity, and he was probably a wanted felon, but he had to admit that she was his only option. So now he was walking nine miles to the nearest town, where he could mail the letter and catch a bus. He had told Jackson and Holt that he was just going to see if he could steal some food. “We’re out of money,” he muttered, which was true. Both boys looked at the floor when he said that. Luke used to sell moonshine, but he stopped that four years ago. A few weeks prior to his decision, he grabbed Holt’s arm and mumbled, “You know, I still feel guilty about what I had to do to pay for the ingredients.” “You mean what you made me do?” Luke recoiled at the anger in Holt's voice. Jackson had been sitting nearby, and while he didn't say anything, his eyes were cold as he looked at his father.

It was true that Luke felt guilty. He knew that he had done something bad, maybe even worse than bringing the boys out to the woods in the first place. But he needed the money, and it wasn’t like he could go around robbing stores. He had to stay on the down low. Luckily for him, there was a man in the small town near the woods who had… certain desires. He was a well-off guy who didn’t ask questions and promised to keep his mouth shut. Luke was initially thrilled about the arrangement, but when he sobered up, he realized that his plan of “let a wealthy pedophile touch my son so I can buy meth” was not very moral. But it was too late to back out of it, so he just looked his sons over and tried to decide which of them would be less traumatized. Then he told Jackson to go play in the woods, told Holt to sit still and not argue with the nice man, and went outside to smoke and ignore the crying from behind the thin walls of the house.

His sons were four at the time.


	2. Phone Call

Haley Glen lived alone. Fourteen years ago, she had been married with two children, but she didn’t like to think about that. Her life had been so completely different back then, but there were still traces of it now. She lived in the same house, which now felt horribly empty, always intending to move away but never going through with it. What if Luke came crawling back with her sons? Every time the doorbell rang, she sprinted to get it, irrationally hoping it would be someone who knew where her children were. When she got a call from an unknown number, she answered eagerly, praying it might be new information she’d missed. If a stranger had walked through her house, they wouldn’t notice anything odd until they reached the second story. Most of the rooms were empty with the doors hanging open, but one was locked. 

If they went inside, they would find a dusty nursery. The walls were painted with an ocean mural, and there were two twin beds with toddler rails around them. Toys were neatly arranged on a little shelf, the closet was full of old baby clothes, and the dresser was conspicuously empty save for the top drawer, which was crammed with photographs. They had been thrown in haphazardly, and many had broken frames. One showed a young couple sitting on the couch, each of them holding a baby, grinning at the camera. Another showed those two babies sitting next to each other on the carpet, with the woman from the first picture kneeling nearby, holding her arms out and encouraging them to walk to her. Most of the pictures were average family photos, but someone with a sharp eye might notice that the father looked incredibly exhausted in later pictures.

After Luke ran off with her babies, Haley gathered up almost all the photos and threw them into the dresser, then locked up the room and hurled the key out a window. She never went upstairs if she could help it. Only one picture remained where she could see it, on her bedside table. That one had been taken a month before her life went to hell. It showed her and her sons standing outside during a rainstorm. Holt was sitting in a puddle and holding his tiny hands out to catch the water, looking fascinated. Jackson was in his mother’s arms, watching the rain fall with a delighted expression. Haley, in sharp contrast to their enthusiasm, was glaring at someone off camera. That someone was Luke, who had taken the picture. He’d been coming home with the stench of meth and sex clinging to his clothes. She was worried, afraid, and planning to divorce him. Maybe he sensed that, because he left before she could. 

She woke up that morning to a cold bed. Of course he was gone. Probably hadn’t made it home last night, the bastard… With a sigh, Hayley had tossed on some sweats and walked upstairs to get her boys. In her memory, the discovery, the realization was a blur. She remembered walking up the stairs, chirping “good morning”, and then there was… confusion, at first. She thought they might have wandered off, so she looked through the house, getting more and more panicked by the minute. Her babies were gone, her husband was gone, she was calling the police and screaming into the phone….

And that was it. Years passed, slowly, and Haley woke up every morning hoping it had all been a nightmare. She watched her nephew grow up. He was a couple months younger than her boys had been. Her sister’s son, Heath. He was loud and obnoxious and energetic, the polar opposite of his mother. Juniper Burns was shy and reserved, but lately she had been yelling at Heath a lot. She and Haley had been awkward around each other for a while as well. The disagreement happened on Christmas Eve. They were sitting on Juniper’s back porch, drinking wine, and Juniper was complaining about her son. “He’s a good kid, but he’s so… I don’t know, all over the place? Smoky thinks he’s got ADHD, but I don’t know if I want to get him tested. It’s too late for that, isn’t it? I mean, shouldn’t I have done that when he was younger? Oof, parenting is tricky these days…” “Is it?” Haley’s voice was quiet. “I wouldn’t know.”

Juniper immediately apologized, but Haley waved her off. “It’s fine. I know you didn’t mean anything by it, I just… I need to get home. Work tomorrow.” She ignored her sister’s drunken apologies and drove back to her house in silence, wondering what her sons were like now. The police had told her that they were dead. Seven years with no new information, that was it, they were gone. But she refused to believe it. It had been well over a decade since her sons were kidnapped, but Haley still liked to imagine that they were alive. She didn’t want to spend her whole life wondering, so she told herself that they were alive, pictured them growing up somewhere far away. She never would have guessed that they were still in the same state.

When she got the call, it was unexpected. She had been smoking and drawing a bird with human eyes when her phone rang. “Hello?” “Is this Haley Glen?” “Who is this?” There was a pause. The person on the other end of the line, an older woman, cleared her throat. “I’m with CPS. Are you Haley Glen?” “Yes, yes, why are you calling?” Her heart was in her throat. Was this…? “Your former husband, Luke Eddowes, was taken into police custody today. He says that your sons, Jackson and Holt, are alive. He called our office and said he had directions to his house, which we now have, and asked that you be notified.”


	3. I'm Your Mother

“I can’t believe this,” Haley muttered as she followed two CPS workers through the forest. She never would have thought Luke was smart enough to hide in plain sight for so long. “How far is it again?” “Twenty minutes, maybe. We’re almost there.” According to Luke, it took three hours to get from the little town nearby to the cabin where he lived. It was the longest three hours of Haley’s life. She had spent years searching for her sons, and now she was finally… it seemed too good to be true. Her heart nearly stopped when they got there. A small clearing. A tiny wooden shack. The sound of a river that she’d been hearing for a while was louder, probably coming from just behind the poor excuse for a house. 

None of that mattered. What mattered was the two teenage boys lying in the grass. One of them was reading an old, tattered book, and the other looked like he might be asleep. Haley swallowed, looking at them. They were so skinny. Holt was tiny, and Haley wondered how tall he was exactly. What worried her more than anything was Jackson’s nervous posture- he looked ready to run away at a moment’s notice. And Holt was lying in an odd position, like there was something wrong with his spine. “Hello,” Haley called in a trembling voice.

Both boys jumped at the sound of her voice. Jackson scrambled to his feet and grabbed Holt’s elbow, pulling him up as well. There were three people just standing there, the first people aside from their father, the rich man from town, and the occasional lost hiker they had seen in fourteen years. They didn’t know them, but the woman in the middle looked… familiar. She was pale, with blue eyes, and flaming red hair streaked with gray and cut into a sharp bob. She looked at them with tears in her eyes, and neither of the twins moved. “We don’t know you,” Holt called across the clearing. The woman flinched visibly at that. “I’m your mother. Hasn’t Luke mentioned me?”

Jackson made a soft noise and squeezed his brother’s arm. Luke had talked about her. He ranted about what a “controlling bitch” she was when he was drunk, sobbed about how much he missed her when he was high, and mumbled that she had been a “free spirit” on the rare occasions when he was sober. When Holt fell out of a tree and broke his pelvis, Luke talked about the time their mother broke her leg. “She hated the cast. Yelled and yelled about it.” Holt, who was eight at the time, just looked at the ceiling. Once, Luke had told them that she was dead, but the next day he said she was perfectly fine. And now… was this really happening?

Haley smiled hopefully. “Do you remember me at all? You were very young, but…” “No. Sorry,” Holt replied bluntly. “Where’d Luke go? He’s been gone for a week now.” “He turned himself in to the police. If you’ll come back with us, I can explain everything,” Haley said hopefully. The twins stared at her fearfully. “How do we know you’re telling the truth?” Her face fell. If she ever got the chance, she was going to kill Luke. How dare he steal her babies and raise them so far away from her that they didn’t even recognize her? If the looks on their faces were anything to go by, they were afraid of her. “He gave us this letter,” one of the CPS workers offered, pulling a folded piece of paper from his pocket.

The two boys walked over to him, Jackson supporting Holt, who was limping and looked like he might not be able to stand on his own. Haley fought down the urge to wrap them in her arms and never let go, noticing sadly how undernourished they both seemed. Jackson took the letter and read it over quickly, frowning as he mouthed some of the words to silently. When he had finished, he handed it to Holt, who read it aloud. “‘To whom it may concern. I, Luke Eddowes, am no longer able to provide for my sons, Jackson and Holt Eddowes. Legally, their mother has custody of them. Her name is Haley Eddowes, unless she’s going by her maiden name, which is Glen. You can find them in a small cabin in the national park, nine miles west of a small town called Ruth. I have done my best to keep them safe.’ Bullshit.” Holt muttered the last word to himself, but it made Haley freeze. Had he hurt them?

After reading the letter, the boys agreed to go back with them, although not very enthusiastically. “How did Luke treat you?” Haley asked a million questions on the long walk back to Ruth, and Holt answered them carefully. “He ignored us, mostly.” Everything he said seemed to make Haley more and more angry, and Holt was scared she was mad at him. He was trying to say the right things, he just didn’t know what those were. “Why do you walk like that?” “I broke my pelvis when I was eight. It never healed right, cause Luke wouldn’t take me to a doctor.” Haley made a strangled noise and clenched her hands into fists, which made both boys step away from her. “No,” she whispered when she saw the way they flinched. “I’m not going to hit you, I would never… did he hit you?” “Sometimes,” Holt responded quietly.

There was a motel in Ruth, and Haley smiled sadly when she saw how captivated the twins were by it. Jackson kept touching the carpet, and while Haley wanted to discourage him (it was probably dirty, she didn’t trust this cheap little place) she couldn’t bring herself to do so. He looked so excited. “We’ve never been into town,” Holt told Haley as he watched Jackson gently pet the floor. “Why doesn’t you brother talk? Is he… is there something wrong? Is he afraid of me?” “No. Jackson just doesn’t talk anymore.” Haley frowned. “He used to talk?” “Yeah. I mean, he was always quiet, but he said stuff. He stopped a couple years ago.” The tone in his voice convinced Haley not to ask anything else. Holt’s voice had cracked when he spoke, and she realized that whatever made Jackson stop talking, neither of them was ready to tell a virtual stranger about it.


End file.
